“Please,” Shallan said. “I need to hear something other than that. Tell me.”
He shivered, but nodded. Voices. Voices would help. “It started when Amaram betrayed me,” he said, tone hushed, just loud enough for her—pressed close—to hear. “He made me a slave for knowing the truth, that he’d killed my men in his lust to get a Shardblade. That it mattered more to him than his own soldiers, more to him than honor…”
He continued on, talking of his days as a slave, of his attempts to escape. Of the men he’d gotten killed for trusting him. It gushed from him, a story he’d never told. Who would he have told it to? Bridge Four had lived most of it with him.
He told her of the wagon and of Tvlakv—that name earned a gasp. She apparently knew him. He spoke of the numbness, the… nothing. The thinking he should kill himself, but the trouble believing that it was worth the effort.
And then, Bridge Four. He didn’t talk about Syl. Too much pain there right now. Instead, he talked of bridge runs, of terror, of death, and of decision.
Rain washed over them, blown in swirls, and he swore he could hear chanting out there somewhere. Some kind of strange spren zipped past their enclosure, red and violet and reminiscent of lightning. Was that what Syl had seen?
Shallan listened. He would have expected questions from her, but she didn’t ask a single one. No pestering for details, no chattering. She apparently did know how to be quiet.
He got through it all, amazingly. The last bridge run. Rescuing Dalinar. He wanted to spill it all out. He talked about facing the Parshendi Shardbearer, about how he’d offended Adolin, about holding the bridgehead on his own…
When he finished, they both let the silence settle on them, and shared warmth. Together, they stared out at the rushing water just out of reach and lit by flashing.
“I killed my father,” Shallan whispered.
Kaladin looked toward her. In a flash of light, he saw her eyes as she looked up from where her head had been resting against his chest, beads of water on her eyelashes. With his hands around her waist, hers around him, it was as close as he’d held a woman since Tarah.
“My father was a violent, angry man,” Shallan said. “A murderer. I loved him. And I strangled him as he lay on the floor, watching me, unable to move. I killed my own father…”
He didn’t prod her, though he wanted to know. Needed to know.
She went on, fortunately, speaking of her youth and the terrors she had known. Kaladin had thought his life terrible, but there was one thing he’d had, and perhaps not cherished enough: parents who loved him. Roshone had brought Damnation itself to Hearthstone, but at least Kaladin’s mother and father had always been there to rely upon.
What would he have done, if his father had been like the abusive, hateful man Shallan described? If his mother had died before his own eyes? What would he have done if, instead of living off Tien’s light, he had been required to bring light to the family?
He listened with wonder. Storms. Why wasn’t this woman broken, truly broken? She described herself that way, but she was no more broken than a spear with a chipped blade—and a spear like that could still be as sharp a weapon as any. He preferred one with a score or two on the blade, a worn handle. A spearhead that had known fighting was just… better than a new one. You could know it had been used by a man fighting for his life, and that it had remained sure and not broken. Marks like those were signs of strength.
He did feel a chill as she mentioned her brother Helaran’s death, anger in her voice.
Helaran had been killed in Alethkar. At Amaram’s hands.
Storms… I killed him, didn’t I? Kaladin thought. The brother she loved. Had he told her about that?
No. No, he hadn’t mentioned that he’d killed the Shardbearer, only that Amaram had killed Kaladin’s men to cover up his lust for the weapon. He’d gotten used to, over the years, referencing the event without mentioning that he’d killed a Shardbearer. His first few months as a slave had beaten into him the dangers of talking about an event like that. He hadn’t even realized he’d fallen into that habit of speaking here.
Did she realize? Had she inferred that Kaladin, not Amaram, had been the one to actually kill the Shardbearer? She didn’t seem to have made that connection. She continued talking, speaking of the night—also during a storm—when she’d poisoned, then murdered her father.
Almighty above. This woman was stronger than he’d ever been.
“And so,” she continued, pressing her head back against his chest, “we decided that I would find Jasnah. She… had a Soulcaster, you see.”
“You wanted to see if she could fix yours?”
“That would have been too rational.” He couldn’t see her scowl at herself, but he heard it, somehow. “My plan—being stupid and naive—was to swap mine for hers and bring back a working one to make money for the family.”
“You had never left your family’s lands before.”
“Yes.”
“And you went to rob one of the smartest women in the world?”
“Er… yes. Remember that bit about ‘stupid and naive’? Anyway, Jasnah found out. Fortunately, I intrigued her and she agreed to take me on as a ward. The marriage to Adolin was her idea, a way to protect my family while I trained.”
“Huh,” he said. Lightning flashed outside. The winds seemed to be building even further, if that was possible, and he had to raise his voice even though Shallan was right there. “Generous, for a woman you intended to rob.”
“I think she saw something in me that—”
Silence.
Kaladin blinked. Shallan was gone. He panicked for a moment, searching about himself, until he realized that his leg no longer hurt and the fuzziness in his head—from blood loss, shock, and possible hypothermia—was gone too.
Ah, he thought. This again.
He took a deep breath and stood up, stepping out of the blackness to the lip of the opening. The stream below had stopped, as if frozen solid, and the opening of the alcove—which Shallan had made far too low to stand up in—could now hold him standing at full height.
He looked out and met the gaze of a face as wide as eternity itself.
“Stormfather,” Kaladin said. Some named him Jezerezeh, Herald. This didn’t fit what Kaladin had heard of any Herald, however. Was the Stormfather a spren, perhaps? A god? It seemed to stretch forever, yet he could see it, make out the face in its infinite expanse.
The winds had stopped. Kaladin could hear his own heartbeat.
CHILD OF HONOR. It spoke to him this time. Last time, in the middle of the storm, it had not—though it had done so in dreams.
Kaladin looked to the side, again checking to see if Shallan was there, but he couldn’t see her any longer. She wasn’t part of this vision, whatever it was.
“She’s one of them, isn’t she?” he asked. “Of the Knights Radiant, or at least a Surgebinder. That’s what happened when fighting the chasmfiend, that’s how she survived the fall. It wasn’t me either time. It was her.”
The Stormfather rumbled.
“Syl,” Kaladin said, looking back to the face. The plateaus in front of him had vanished. It was just him and the face. He had to ask. It hurt him, but he had to. “What have I done to her?”